People believe things which are convenient to them.
Really, that's all you need to know. Humans aren't designed to rationally assess truth. Instead, when presented with a set of answers, they will ask themselves (subconsciously), which one of these being true is best for me? And then they will seek out reasons why that answer is correct.
This was the genius of social media. It presented people with the "truth" they wanted to hear. And the more that "truth" was reinforced, the harder it is to get people to accept alternatives.
Trump plugged into that*. He told a group of people "it's not your fault. it's the fault of [x]'. Which are the sweetest words in the English language. To be absolved of all resposibility, and to know that anything that negatively befell you was the result of the liberal elite / systematic racism / Mexican immigrants / etc.
Well, it's one hell of a rush.
Unless we can find a way to deprogram people. (And PB is a massive fucking rare example of people actually discussing issues - even if some people are slightly mad on some subjects - rather than choosing an echo chamber.)
* As did Black Lives Matter, and a host of other people and organizations
To me the discussions on this website demonstrate that educated, affluent people are often captured by the same simple explanatory political narratives as everyone else - although they perhaps become more articulate in perpetrating them. I'm not sure you can ever really 'break free' from them. In religion or politics people just like simple answers that reinforce their prejudices and it has been like that forever. The best defence against this is a culture of free speech, free enquiry, the idea of objectivity and the search for objective truth being a virtue, etc.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
This is such bollocks.
I suspect those in a rush to dismiss the figures should ask themselves how many of the UK’s cities have a metro, light rail, or tram?
I’d guess that the UK has c. 20 cities over 250k population.
The point of the chart is to excite reader's confirmation bias that the UK is shit, and everywhere else is better - including the US - so they've drawn the parameters to reach the conclusion they want, and you've wholly been taken in by it.
Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh and (some of) London and Birmingham have trams. Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds do not but they have pretty good suburban rail/metros and bus networks, making the comparison an entirely synthetic one.
I haven’t seen anyone take it down with reference to the data they’ve presented. Richard Tyndall comes closest but he seems to miscount the FUAs as defined by the OECD.
It absolutely has been taken down by pointing out that the data they've presented is headlined 'public transport' yet excludes buses, the #1 most used form of public transport.
Heck, look at the words you yourself used. "FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK"
Yes, if you exclude the most commonly used form of public transport, then the data is simply wrong.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
This is such bollocks.
I suspect those in a rush to dismiss the figures should ask themselves how many of the UK’s cities have a metro, light rail, or tram?
I’d guess that the UK has c. 20 cities over 250k population.
I've just checked TfL figures. Buses are the most used for journeys in London, about 5x the journeys of national and overground rail combined, 100x trams, and even about 50% more than the underground. So excluding buses from a view of public transport is ridiculous.
Ok but London has all of those modes. As we see from the stats, Britain relies much more heavily on bus and heavy rail than competitors.
If buses and heavy rail aren’t public transport, then what are they?
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
This is such bollocks.
I suspect those in a rush to dismiss the figures should ask themselves how many of the UK’s cities have a metro, light rail, or tram?
I’d guess that the UK has c. 20 cities over 250k population.
The point of the chart is to excite reader's confirmation bias that the UK is shit, and everywhere else is better - including the US - so they've drawn the parameters to reach the conclusion they want, and you've wholly been taken in by it.
Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh and (some of) London and Birmingham have trams. Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds do not but they have pretty good suburban rail/metros and bus networks, making the comparison an entirely synthetic one.
It's sort of true that Birmingham both has and doesn't have trams. We have trams, but only very few. Sometimes they are there; sometimes they aren't.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
The OECD defines “functional urban areas”. I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
This is such bollocks.
I suspect those in a rush to dismiss the figures should ask themselves how many of the UK’s cities have a metro, light rail, or tram?
I’d guess that the UK has c. 20 cities over 250k population.
The point of the chart is to excite reader's confirmation bias that the UK is shit, and everywhere else is better - including the US - so they've drawn the parameters to reach the conclusion they want, and you've wholly been taken in by it.
Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh and (some of) London and Birmingham have trams. Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds do not but they have pretty good suburban rail/metros and bus networks, making the comparison an entirely synthetic one.
It's sort of true that Birmingham both has and doesn't have trams. We have trams, but only very few. Sometimes they are there; sometimes they aren't.
There's a big difference between having a tram line and having a network.
Yes, the quality of a network is far more worthy of investigation than a ridiculous boolean of saying yes or no based on absurd criteria.
Having one bus that leaves once an hour and only heads into the town centre is a crap form of public transport. Having routine buses that leave every few minutes and where you can easily get from anywhere to anywhere is excellent.
Having few tram lines that goes not very many places, not very often is a crap form of public transport. Having many tram lines with trams that go everywhere every few minutes is excellent.
The quality is not determined by whether bus or tram, its the quality. The reliability, the frequency, the ability to easily get around.
Something that can't really be discussed in such a silly boolean format.
Bob Altermeyer would probably argue that Trump is the classic narcissistic authoritarian leader. In his model, the population that needs / wants to be led by a “strong leader” casts about for such an individual to project their desires on. In turn, the narcissist politician has no internal moral value structure of their own & depends utterly on the approval of the crowd. The two amplify each other, the crowd giving their chosen leader the attention they crave in return for the leader telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear.
You can see some of this playing out in the way Trump casts out ideas almost randomly at events, and latches on to the ones that resonate with the crowd (lock her up!) & abandons the ones that the crowd dislikes (e.g. covid vaccination).
Altermeyer comes across merely as a partisan of the other side in that piece. His list of things that supposedly harmed the United States depends on having a particular view of US foreign policy that isn't universally shared. How did Trump's "threats to NATO", i.e. telling Germany to spend more on defence and stop buying Russian gas, harm the US? If only they'd listened at the time...
The stopped clock effect with Trump on NATO was entertaining.
We had posters on here suggesting that it was a bad idea for Germany to re-arm, because of er.. previous German foreign policy excursions
When people pointed out that the German Army had more tanks than the U.K. in the 80s, this was taken as a pro-Trump statement!
Well, that is the traditional reason and long pre-dates Trump. Germany has also changed the words to the national anthem even though that song is usually not regarded as the most offensive part of the Nazi era.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
Presenting obviously Prof. Peston Grade numbers does nothing. Just feeds the FT click bait stupidity. They have gone done the route the Economist went, sadly.
Any chart that says that the US has better public transport than the UK is patently ridiculous.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
This is such bollocks.
I suspect those in a rush to dismiss the figures should ask themselves how many of the UK’s cities have a metro, light rail, or tram?
I’d guess that the UK has c. 20 cities over 250k population.
The point of the chart is to excite reader's confirmation bias that the UK is shit, and everywhere else is better - including the US - so they've drawn the parameters to reach the conclusion they want, and you've wholly been taken in by it.
Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh and (some of) London and Birmingham have trams. Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds do not but they have pretty good suburban rail/metros and bus networks, making the comparison an entirely synthetic one.
I haven’t seen anyone take it down with reference to the data they’ve presented. Richard Tyndall comes closest but he seems to miscount the FUAs as defined by the OECD.
It absolutely has been taken down by pointing out that the data they've presented is headlined 'public transport' yet excludes buses, the #1 most used form of public transport.
Heck, look at the words you yourself used. "FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK"
Yes, if you exclude the most commonly used form of public transport, then the data is simply wrong.
Or to quote you again: "This is such bollocks."
I think it was Casino who talked bollocks. On this thread, anyway.
As it happens, I do think excluding buses is still a useful lens, for the reason noted in the link cited by @Stuartinromford.
Newspapers used to have decent fact checkers who wouldn't allow total nonsense to be printed. I don't know what happened to them.
Again, it’s not obvious the facts here are wrong. You can complain about the exclusion of buses, but I haven’t seen you correct the data.
My gentle advice is not to go into the fact-checking business yourself.
Include buses and the data is presumably 100% of FUAs of 250k population plus have public transport.
So yes, the data is wrong.
I challenge you to find a single UK FUA without buses or any other public transport infrastructure. Let alone 75% of them.
The chart defines public transport infra by excluding buses. So you’re arguing against a straw man. Comme d’habitude.
Yes, that's the point. The chart is a straw man. Public transport includes buses, so anyone quoting data excluding it is lying or setting up a straw man.
Anyone who takes that chart credibly is only showing their own ignorance and how credulous they are.
Its bullshit data, based on bullshit criteria. Bullshit in, bullshit out.
Its past time for you to admit that you got this wrong, got suckered in by trolling nonsense, drop it and move on.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
Presenting obviously Prof. Peston Grade numbers does nothing. Just feeds the FT click bait stupidity. They have gone done the route the Economist went, sadly.
Any chart that says that the US has better public transport than the UK is patently ridiculous.
Another ”bristler”. The chart, admittedly if you read the small print, makes a definition of public transport in which the US appears to outpace the UK.
I agree it is counterintuitive which is why I shared it. It makes you think.
Bob Altermeyer would probably argue that Trump is the classic narcissistic authoritarian leader. In his model, the population that needs / wants to be led by a “strong leader” casts about for such an individual to project their desires on. In turn, the narcissist politician has no internal moral value structure of their own & depends utterly on the approval of the crowd. The two amplify each other, the crowd giving their chosen leader the attention they crave in return for the leader telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear.
You can see some of this playing out in the way Trump casts out ideas almost randomly at events, and latches on to the ones that resonate with the crowd (lock her up!) & abandons the ones that the crowd dislikes (e.g. covid vaccination).
Altermeyer comes across merely as a partisan of the other side in that piece. His list of things that supposedly harmed the United States depends on having a particular view of US foreign policy that isn't universally shared. How did Trump's "threats to NATO", i.e. telling Germany to spend more on defence and stop buying Russian gas, harm the US? If only they'd listened at the time...
The stopped clock effect with Trump on NATO was entertaining.
We had posters on here suggesting that it was a bad idea for Germany to re-arm, because of er.. previous German foreign policy excursions
When people pointed out that the German Army had more tanks than the U.K. in the 80s, this was taken as a pro-Trump statement!
Well, that is the traditional reason and long pre-dates Trump. Germany has also changed the words to the national anthem even though that song is usually not regarded as the most offensive part of the Nazi era.
No-one was bothered by the size of the West German military* in the 80s - they had an airforce and army that was pretty similar to the UK.
I associate the whole Germans=Nazis thing with (1) A small number of survivors of those times, (2) modern morons.
The Germans have spent a great deal of time, effort and soul searching in creating a Germany that Isn't *That* Kind Of Germany.
The national anthem predates the Nazis. Oh, and it has been modified - to remove the imperialist bits.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
This is such bollocks.
I suspect those in a rush to dismiss the figures should ask themselves how many of the UK’s cities have a metro, light rail, or tram?
I’d guess that the UK has c. 20 cities over 250k population.
The point of the chart is to excite reader's confirmation bias that the UK is shit, and everywhere else is better - including the US - so they've drawn the parameters to reach the conclusion they want, and you've wholly been taken in by it.
Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh and (some of) London and Birmingham have trams. Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds do not but they have pretty good suburban rail/metros and bus networks, making the comparison an entirely synthetic one.
It's sort of true that Birmingham both has and doesn't have trams. We have trams, but only very few. Sometimes they are there; sometimes they aren't.
There's a big difference between having a tram line and having a network.
Yes, the quality of a network is far more worthy of investigation than a ridiculous boolean of saying yes or no based on absurd criteria.
Having one bus that leaves once an hour and only heads into the town centre is a crap form of public transport. Having routine buses that leave every few minutes and where you can easily get from anywhere to anywhere is excellent.
Having few tram lines that goes not very many places, not very often is a crap form of public transport. Having many tram lines with trams that go everywhere every few minutes is excellent.
The quality is not determined by whether bus or tram, its the quality. The reliability, the frequency, the ability to easily get around.
Something that can't really be discussed in such a silly boolean format.
Picking up that bit, because the argument is that buses, no matter how frequent, struggle to be excellent. For the reason discussed in the article- road traffic slows down a peak times, making bus (+car) dependent cities less productive than the could/should be.
In which case, pointing out that UK mid sized cities make much less use of light rail/trams/metros than foreign mid sized cities is exactly the point.
I had to disappear while the Hanratty wars were still raging on the previous thread. Funny how such an old case still stirs passions. I don't want to revisit the many issues raised about the case itself - it would take too long and require huge knowledge of the facts - but I did want to cover a couple of points concerning the more managable topic of the DNA revelations, as these were relatively recent and clearly subject to some misapprehensions here.
Before the DNA results became known I was of the opinion that the true identity of the murderer could not be known with any certainty. I estimated the probaility that it was Hanratty at about 20%. When I heard the results, like many others my first reaction was 'Well that's a surprise. How wrong I was.' On closer consideration however I soon realised that it wasn't quite as simple as that. As I tried to explain earlier (largely unsuccessfully it seems) there were problems with the samples, materials could not have been appropriately stored, possible cross-contamination would have been an issue, not to mention just plain old-fashioned rigging.
It would however be as perverse to dismiss the DNA contribution out of hand as it would to accept it uncritically. Personally I upgraded my own estimate of Hanratty's guilt to 25% as a result. Alphon I would now have at 50%, and the remaining 25% allows for person(s) unknown who were never seriously investigated at the time.
I take the view however that not only does the DNA evidence seems to finally close all avenues of appeal but that that is a good thing. Hanratty may not have been the murderer but he was an odious little criminal who contributed greatly to his own demise, not least by lying to the court and his own defence counsel until he belatedly realised that he may well swing for the crime. If the DNA results had exonerated him, the case would have had to be reopened and we would have had the ghastly prospect of the whole business being trawled over again, and this time with every likelihood of civil actions against the police for their mishandling of the original inquiry. It may shock you to learn that I don't think that would be a very good use of public money and resources. It may shock you even more to know that if I had been running the DNA tests, I might have been seriously tempted to find a result that avoided that outcome.
Although the A6 Murder still divides opinion there is a surprising amount of agreement on certain aspects of it. For example, most agree that on the facts presented at the trial, he should have been found not guilty. It should never have been held in Bedford. And of course the police made a right pig's ear of the investigation.
My own view on the main question is a common one, DNA results notwithstanding. It's impossible to be sure who did it but on the balance of probabilities Alphon was always a more likely suspect, and remains so to this day.
Newspapers used to have decent fact checkers who wouldn't allow total nonsense to be printed. I don't know what happened to them.
Again, it’s not obvious the facts here are wrong. You can complain about the exclusion of buses, but I haven’t seen you correct the data.
My gentle advice is not to go into the fact-checking business yourself.
Include buses and the data is presumably 100% of FUAs of 250k population plus have public transport.
So yes, the data is wrong.
I challenge you to find a single UK FUA without buses or any other public transport infrastructure. Let alone 75% of them.
The chart defines public transport infra by excluding buses. So you’re arguing against a straw man. Comme d’habitude.
Yes, that's the point. The chart is a straw man. Public transport includes buses, so anyone quoting data excluding it is lying or setting up a straw man.
Anyone who takes that chart credibly is only showing their own ignorance and how credulous they are.
Its bullshit data, based on bullshit criteria. Bullshit in, bullshit out.
Its past time for you to admit that you got this wrong, got suckered in by trolling nonsense, drop it and move on.
I think it’s an interesting chart. Perhaps it tells us something about Britain’s urban economic performance.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
This is such bollocks.
I suspect those in a rush to dismiss the figures should ask themselves how many of the UK’s cities have a metro, light rail, or tram?
I’d guess that the UK has c. 20 cities over 250k population.
The point of the chart is to excite reader's confirmation bias that the UK is shit, and everywhere else is better - including the US - so they've drawn the parameters to reach the conclusion they want, and you've wholly been taken in by it.
Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh and (some of) London and Birmingham have trams. Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds do not but they have pretty good suburban rail/metros and bus networks, making the comparison an entirely synthetic one.
It's sort of true that Birmingham both has and doesn't have trams. We have trams, but only very few. Sometimes they are there; sometimes they aren't.
There's a big difference between having a tram line and having a network.
Yes, the quality of a network is far more worthy of investigation than a ridiculous boolean of saying yes or no based on absurd criteria.
Having one bus that leaves once an hour and only heads into the town centre is a crap form of public transport. Having routine buses that leave every few minutes and where you can easily get from anywhere to anywhere is excellent.
Having few tram lines that goes not very many places, not very often is a crap form of public transport. Having many tram lines with trams that go everywhere every few minutes is excellent.
The quality is not determined by whether bus or tram, its the quality. The reliability, the frequency, the ability to easily get around.
Something that can't really be discussed in such a silly boolean format.
Picking up that bit, because the argument is that buses, no matter how frequent, struggle to be excellent. For the reason discussed in the article- road traffic slows down a peak times, making bus (+car) dependent cities less productive than the could/should be.
In which case, pointing out that UK mid sized cities make much less use of light rail/trams/metros than foreign mid sized cities is exactly the point.
Albeit the headline is poor.
That depends upon if you have bus lanes or not, if you have congestion problems or not, and much more.
Where I live the problem with buses isn't congestion, its far more the lack of frequency.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
Presenting obviously Prof. Peston Grade numbers does nothing. Just feeds the FT click bait stupidity. They have gone done the route the Economist went, sadly.
Any chart that says that the US has better public transport than the UK is patently ridiculous.
Another ”bristler”. The chart, admittedly if you read the small print, makes a definition of public transport in which the US appears to outpace the UK.
I agree it is counterintuitive which is why I shared it. It makes you think.
Ha - playing the man, not the ball...
If I presented a chart that showed race relations in 1960's US as better than 1960s Switzerland, would that "Make you think"? It would certainly make me wonder how the data had been tortured*...
If you wanted to present a chart on take-up of light rail, that would be interesting.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
The OECD defines “functional urban areas”. I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
I have looked and it really is rubbish in terms of what we are discussing.
According to the OECD a Functional Urban Area includes not only the city but all the adjacent non urban area which serves as commutor and feeder areas for the city. So According to their definition - and they are explicit in this - the Oxford FUA includes the Vale of the White Horse and West Oxfordshire and the Southhampton FUA includes the New Forest and the Test Valley.
Most of the areas listed as part of the Stavanger and Tronjheim FUAs are small villages and rural communities.
It is rubbish and has absolutely no bearing on what we have been discussing.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
Presenting obviously Prof. Peston Grade numbers does nothing. Just feeds the FT click bait stupidity. They have gone done the route the Economist went, sadly.
Any chart that says that the US has better public transport than the UK is patently ridiculous.
Another ”bristler”. The chart, admittedly if you read the small print, makes a definition of public transport in which the US appears to outpace the UK.
I agree it is counterintuitive which is why I shared it. It makes you think.
Ha - playing the man, not the ball...
If I presented a chart that showed race relations in 1960's US as better than 1960s Switzerland, would that "Make you think"? It would certainly make me wonder how the data had been tortured*...
If you wanted to present a chart on take-up of light rail, that would be interesting.
*Presumably shot and dumped in a levy.
Switzerland still prohibited female voting in some cantons until the 80s, so it would not at all surprise me to learn that Swiss race relations compared unfavourably to the US’s in the 1960s.
But I guess you’re trying to make another point.
The chart is a kind of proxy for light rail, isn’t it? I mean, it’s included, whereas heavy rail is not.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
The OECD defines “functional urban areas”. I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
I have looked and it really is rubbish in terms of what we are discussing.
According to the OECD a Functional Urban Area includes not only the city but all the adjacent non urban area which serves as commutor and feeder areas for the city. So According to their definition - and they are explicit in this - the Oxford FUA includes the Vale of the White Horse and West Oxfordshire and the Southhampton FUA includes the New Forest and the Test Valley.
Most of the areas listed as part of the Stavanger and Tronjheim FUAs are small villages and rural communities.
It is rubbish and has absolutely no bearing on what we have been discussing.
So you disagree that commuter areas should be included in an analysis of commuting systems?
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
Presenting obviously Prof. Peston Grade numbers does nothing. Just feeds the FT click bait stupidity. They have gone done the route the Economist went, sadly.
Any chart that says that the US has better public transport than the UK is patently ridiculous.
Another ”bristler”. The chart, admittedly if you read the small print, makes a definition of public transport in which the US appears to outpace the UK.
I agree it is counterintuitive which is why I shared it. It makes you think.
Ha - playing the man, not the ball...
If I presented a chart that showed race relations in 1960's US as better than 1960s Switzerland, would that "Make you think"? It would certainly make me wonder how the data had been tortured*...
If you wanted to present a chart on take-up of light rail, that would be interesting.
*Presumably shot and dumped in a levy.
Yes, this is what I said initially. People act infantilised with data nowadays.
If the data doesn't pass the "sniff test" then you should question it and double-check the data and methodology. If the methodology is sound (this one is not) and the data is right, that should make you stop and think. If the data is wrong or the methodology is, then put the thing in the bin or fix it.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
The OECD defines “functional urban areas”. I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
I have looked and it really is rubbish in terms of what we are discussing.
According to the OECD a Functional Urban Area includes not only the city but all the adjacent non urban area which serves as commutor and feeder areas for the city. So According to their definition - and they are explicit in this - the Oxford FUA includes the Vale of the White Horse and West Oxfordshire and the Southhampton FUA includes the New Forest and the Test Valley.
Most of the areas listed as part of the Stavanger and Tronjheim FUAs are small villages and rural communities.
It is rubbish and has absolutely no bearing on what we have been discussing.
So you disagree that commuter areas should be included in an analysis of commuting systems?
“It’s a view”.
I disagree that any defintion of a city should include villages and towns miles from the urban area. I doubt anyone on here would seriously include the New Forest as part of the Southhampton Urban Area.
Face it, you used data without checking how it had been collected and what it was actually referencing. It may have some function in a different debate but in this instance complaining that a tram system does not extend to the New Forest of the Vale of the White Horse is pretty desperate stuff.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
Depends on how defined. The Stavanger ‘metro area’, for example, has a population over 300k.
It’s a pretty pointless argument, though.
A bit of reading suggests Norwegian public transport is considerably better than ours (certainly outside London) - but they are, of course, a far wealthier country.
I had to disappear while the Hanratty wars were still raging on the previous thread. Funny how such an old case still stirs passions. I don't want to revisit the many issues raised about the case itself - it would take too long and require huge knowledge of the facts - but I did want to cover a couple of points concerning the more managable topic of the DNA revelations, as these were relatively recent and clearly subject to some misapprehensions here.
Before the DNA results became known I was of the opinion that the true identity of the murderer could not be known with any certainty. I estimated the probaility that it was Hanratty at about 20%. When I heard the results, like many others my first reaction was 'Well that's a surprise. How wrong I was.' On closer consideration however I soon realised that it wasn't quite as simple as that. As I tried to explain earlier (largely unsuccessfully it seems) there were problems with the samples, materials could not have been appropriately stored, possible cross-contamination would have been an issue, not to mention just plain old-fashioned rigging.
It would however be as perverse to dismiss the DNA contribution out of hand as it would to accept it uncritically. Personally I upgraded my own estimate of Hanratty's guilt to 25% as a result. Alphon I would now have at 50%, and the remaining 25% allows for person(s) unknown who were never seriously investigated at the time.
I take the view however that not only does the DNA evidence seems to finally close all avenues of appeal but that that is a good thing. Hanratty may not have been the murderer but he was an odious little criminal who contributed greatly to his own demise, not least by lying to the court and his own defence counsel until he belatedly realised that he may well swing for the crime. If the DNA results had exonerated him, the case would have had to be reopened and we would have had the ghastly prospect of the whole business being trawled over again, and this time with every likelihood of civil actions against the police for their mishandling of the original inquiry. It may shock you to learn that I don't think that would be a very good use of public money and resources. It may shock you even more to know that if I had been running the DNA tests, I might have been seriously tempted to find a result that avoided that outcome.
Although the A6 Murder still divides opinion there is a surprising amount of agreement on certain aspects of it. For example, most agree that on the facts presented at the trial, he should have been found not guilty. It should never have been held in Bedford. And of course the police made a right pig's ear of the investigation.
My own view on the main question is a common one, DNA results notwithstanding. It's impossible to be sure who did it but on the balance of probabilities Alphon was always a more likely suspect, and remains so to this day.
Thanks for this summary. I think you have a couple of obstacles to overcome.
As to the original trial, the identification evidence (as the law was then) took the matter past half time - the judge would have ruled there was a case to answer.
Once you are at that point the defence can either put up or shut up. A defence was put up, and the defence changed during from the trial from one alibi to another. Two differing and weak alibis covering the same time period do not amount to a credible defence. The jury were entitled to draw their own conclusions that such a defence could only be mounted by someone who was guilty.
Secondly, the new DNA evidence (clothing and handkerchief) is of itself compelling. Those who say 'cross contamination/plant' have to mount a basis with possible facts and a timeline upon which this is possible and credible. Generalisations won't do.
Ask this question: If the new DNA examination had shown up DNA other than Hanratty, would Michael Mansfield QC (as he then was) have suggested contamination as plausible?
On Topic: I can usually at least understand things I dislike (Brexit, the Tories, jazz) but I do struggle with Donald Trump. WTF is the appeal? Emotional age of about 7. The attention span of a flea. Pig ignorant, cruel, petty, narcissistic, deeply misogynist. Funny? Sure, if your idea of humour consists exclusively of cheap digs at other people. And just so obviously out for himself and only himself.
Yet tens of millions of adult Americans are in thrall to the horrible geezer. I don’t get it. The reasons usually advanced (globalisation hurting the trad white working class, liberal elites sneering at them and their values, a feeling of abandonment by mainstream politicians); these make for good weighty articles etc but it doesn’t ring true to me as an explanation for something so bizarre.
It looks like a mass psychosis to me. More akin to Jonestown than a political populist movement. He was a horror of a person too who was able to brainwash many who came into his orbit. I wonder how many ‘Trumpers’ are actually damaged vulnerable people, lonely perhaps, men and women who have rather lost their bearings in life? I’d be interested in the stats on that.
What’s wrong with jazz? Admittedly some of it is unlistenable but you’d have to have feet buried in concrete not to be moved by Billie Holiday
Given that Kinabula has demonstrated precisely zero understanding here of either Brexit or Tories, one can only imagine his deep understanding of jazz is on a similar imagined level.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
The OECD defines “functional urban areas”. I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
I have looked and it really is rubbish in terms of what we are discussing.
According to the OECD a Functional Urban Area includes not only the city but all the adjacent non urban area which serves as commutor and feeder areas for the city. So According to their definition - and they are explicit in this - the Oxford FUA includes the Vale of the White Horse and West Oxfordshire and the Southhampton FUA includes the New Forest and the Test Valley.
Most of the areas listed as part of the Stavanger and Tronjheim FUAs are small villages and rural communities.
It is rubbish and has absolutely no bearing on what we have been discussing.
So you disagree that commuter areas should be included in an analysis of commuting systems?
“It’s a view”.
I disagree that any defintion of a city should include villages and towns miles from the urban area. I doubt anyone on here would seriously include the New Forest as part of the Southhampton Urban Area.
Face it, you used data without checking how it had been collected and what it was actually referencing. It may have some function in a different debate but in this instance complaining that a tram system does not extend to the New Forest of the Vale of the White Horse is pretty desperate stuff.
Well I disagree with you.
Southampton’s commuter area does extend to the New Forest, as you can see from the “travel to work area” maps published after every census.
You are perhaps caught up on the words “urban area”. And you are quarrelling now with the OECD and urban geographers.
The economic reason for public transport systems is indeed to improve access for a catchment of labour to jobs.
It’s entirely possible to imagine a tram from, say, Lyndhurst into Soton town centre.
Auckland, which has crap public transport, but with which I’m familiar, has a line terminating in the bush clad rurality of “Swanson” in the West, which is 10 miles from downtown.
It's sort of true that Birmingham both has and doesn't have trams. We have trams, but only very few.
Which is why usage or journey availability is a more useful stat. The railways have an about 8% share for passenger-miles in the UK, in the US it's less than 0.5%.
The BBC and Guardian are leading on a stolen and improper kiss. I suppose Ukraine, Sudan, Niger, Putin, Wagner Group, Trump and various other things are pretty much sorted for now and it's a slow news day.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
Presenting obviously Prof. Peston Grade numbers does nothing. Just feeds the FT click bait stupidity. They have gone done the route the Economist went, sadly.
Any chart that says that the US has better public transport than the UK is patently ridiculous.
Another ”bristler”. The chart, admittedly if you read the small print, makes a definition of public transport in which the US appears to outpace the UK.
I agree it is counterintuitive which is why I shared it. It makes you think.
Ha - playing the man, not the ball...
If I presented a chart that showed race relations in 1960's US as better than 1960s Switzerland, would that "Make you think"? It would certainly make me wonder how the data had been tortured*...
If you wanted to present a chart on take-up of light rail, that would be interesting.
*Presumably shot and dumped in a levy.
Switzerland still prohibited female voting in some cantons until the 80s, so it would not at all surprise me to learn that Swiss race relations compared unfavourably to the US’s in the 1960s.
But I guess you’re trying to make another point.
The chart is a kind of proxy for light rail, isn’t it? I mean, it’s included, whereas heavy rail is not.
Black people weren't being openly barred from jobs in Switzerland. By senior government officials. Or being shot and dumped in a ditch for thinking they could vote.
So you'd need some pretty good data to start making people believe that it was better in the US.
Old stats course gag - Between 1860 and 1960 no White man was convicted of murdering a Black man in Mississippi. Lots of Black men were convicted of murdering White men. What can we conclude about race relations in Mississippi?
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
There are many things we can, should and must do to start a national recovery, and some of these may involve emulating successful policies from the Continent. But not all. How comfortable are you and Stuartinromford with items on the agenda that make use of no longer being in the EU, or might involve disagreement with the EU? Or do you insist that these don't exist?
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
There are many things we can, should and must do to start a national recovery, and some of these may involve emulating successful policies from the Continent. But not all. How comfortable are you and Stuartinromford with items on the agenda that make use of no longer being in the EU, or might involve disagreement with the EU? Or do you insist that these don't exist?
I am quite happy to discuss them.
You mistake me if you think I believe everything about the EU is amazing, or even if there are not some potential advantages (comparable though, rather than absolute) from leaving the EU.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
There are many things we can, should and must do to start a national recovery, and some of these may involve emulating successful policies from the Continent. But not all. How comfortable are you and Stuartinromford with items on the agenda that make use of no longer being in the EU, or might involve disagreement with the EU? Or do you insist that these don't exist?
I am quite happy to discuss them. You mistake me if you think I believe everything about the EU is amazing, or even if
New from @IpsosUK : 56% of the public think it is likely that Keir Starmer will be PM. Back up to previous highs last October - that poll was taken at the time Liz Truss resigned.
3/ It's not all good news for Starmer. Public are still split on knowing what he stands for. Will this become more important as election approaches? You'd think so and yet...
5/ We can talk about public not being 100% sold on Labour or there being doubts about Starmer etc (some truth in it, some overblown) but whilst the Tories are in this territory it probably doesn't matter.
You don't have to be a data nerd like me to know that's a bad trend!
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
Depends on how defined. The Stavanger ‘metro area’, for example, has a population over 300k.
It’s a pretty pointless argument, though.
A bit of reading suggests Norwegian public transport is considerably better than ours (certainly outside London) - but they are, of course, a far wealthier country.
Pointless and dull argument over semantics? I can see this lasting all bank holiday weekend.....
Bob Altermeyer would probably argue that Trump is the classic narcissistic authoritarian leader. In his model, the population that needs / wants to be led by a “strong leader” casts about for such an individual to project their desires on. In turn, the narcissist politician has no internal moral value structure of their own & depends utterly on the approval of the crowd. The two amplify each other, the crowd giving their chosen leader the attention they crave in return for the leader telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear.
You can see some of this playing out in the way Trump casts out ideas almost randomly at events, and latches on to the ones that resonate with the crowd (lock her up!) & abandons the ones that the crowd dislikes (e.g. covid vaccination).
Altermeyer comes across merely as a partisan of the other side in that piece. His list of things that supposedly harmed the United States depends on having a particular view of US foreign policy that isn't universally shared. How did Trump's "threats to NATO", i.e. telling Germany to spend more on defence and stop buying Russian gas, harm the US? If only they'd listened at the time...
How did Germany buying Russian gas end up hurting them?
It turns out - as I've repeated ad nauseum - that energy is pretty fungible. The Russian "we'll cut the Europeans off and they'll freeze" threat turned out to be complete rubbish.
Now: you can argue that the Russians did believe it, and based their decisions on that misconception. But that's hardly the German's fault.
How long until Slalom Sir Keir has to swerve away from this horseshit?
Unless he plans on taxing their overseas earnings, which would be nuts, it won't make a lot of difference.
Shell would simply move HQ (as in tax location) back to the Netherlands. Which would take a very little effort. And they would be extremely welcome there, politically.
I know why he is doing it, but it’s not good that Keir is suggesting we can have shiny things (“a lower cost of living”) simply by taxing the oil industry.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
The OECD defines “functional urban areas”. I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
I have looked and it really is rubbish in terms of what we are discussing.
According to the OECD a Functional Urban Area includes not only the city but all the adjacent non urban area which serves as commutor and feeder areas for the city. So According to their definition - and they are explicit in this - the Oxford FUA includes the Vale of the White Horse and West Oxfordshire and the Southhampton FUA includes the New Forest and the Test Valley.
Most of the areas listed as part of the Stavanger and Tronjheim FUAs are small villages and rural communities.
It is rubbish and has absolutely no bearing on what we have been discussing.
So you disagree that commuter areas should be included in an analysis of commuting systems?
“It’s a view”.
I disagree that any defintion of a city should include villages and towns miles from the urban area. I doubt anyone on here would seriously include the New Forest as part of the Southhampton Urban Area.
Face it, you used data without checking how it had been collected and what it was actually referencing. It may have some function in a different debate but in this instance complaining that a tram system does not extend to the New Forest of the Vale of the White Horse is pretty desperate stuff.
Well I disagree with you.
Southampton’s commuter area does extend to the New Forest, as you can see from the “travel to work area” maps published after every census.
You are perhaps caught up on the words “urban area”. And you are quarrelling now with the OECD and urban geographers.
The economic reason for public transport systems is indeed to improve access for a catchment of labour to jobs.
It’s entirely possible to imagine a tram from, say, Lyndhurst into Soton town centre.
Auckland, which has crap public transport, but with which I’m familiar, has a line terminating in the bush clad rurality of “Swanson” in the West, which is 10 miles from downtown.
No I am caught up on the fact that we were discussing cities with trams, metro and light rail systems and you have tried to introduce rural area miles from the urban sprawl because you won't admit that you used data without checking what it actually referred to.
No I correct that, you did admit that and when someone checked it for you and found out it was rubbish you then doubled down on it.
As someone has already said, your numbers were a classic example or garbage in garbage out.
And you have the cheek to criticise Andy's fact checking.
Public transport in many European countries is better than in the UK, especially in other north-western European countries.
My experience of Italian suburban rail transport last week was fairly poor. I fear many people compare the prestigious high-speed networks of one country with the mundane commuter services of another. "Look! France has the TGV!", whilst neglecting to mention SNCF's local services.
I know why he is doing it, but it’s not good that Keir is suggesting we can have shiny things (“a lower cost of living”) simply by taxing the oil industry.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
There are many things we can, should and must do to start a national recovery, and some of these may involve emulating successful policies from the Continent. But not all. How comfortable are you and Stuartinromford with items on the agenda that make use of no longer being in the EU, or might involve disagreement with the EU? Or do you insist that these don't exist?
I am quite happy to discuss them. You mistake me if you think I believe everything about the EU is amazing, or even if
Bob Altermeyer would probably argue that Trump is the classic narcissistic authoritarian leader. In his model, the population that needs / wants to be led by a “strong leader” casts about for such an individual to project their desires on. In turn, the narcissist politician has no internal moral value structure of their own & depends utterly on the approval of the crowd. The two amplify each other, the crowd giving their chosen leader the attention they crave in return for the leader telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear.
You can see some of this playing out in the way Trump casts out ideas almost randomly at events, and latches on to the ones that resonate with the crowd (lock her up!) & abandons the ones that the crowd dislikes (e.g. covid vaccination).
Altermeyer comes across merely as a partisan of the other side in that piece. His list of things that supposedly harmed the United States depends on having a particular view of US foreign policy that isn't universally shared. How did Trump's "threats to NATO", i.e. telling Germany to spend more on defence and stop buying Russian gas, harm the US? If only they'd listened at the time...
How did Germany buying Russian gas end up hurting them?
It turns out - as I've repeated ad nauseum - that energy is pretty fungible. The Russian "we'll cut the Europeans off and they'll freeze" threat turned out to be complete rubbish.
Now: you can argue that the Russians did believe it, and based their decisions on that misconception. But that's hardly the German's fault.
There was a nasty crunch in the German economy from cutting off the cheap Russian gas.
It took a fair bit of time to get the alternatives on line, and prices are still higher than they were. There was a massive campaign to reduce gas usage throughout Germany, which still continues.
Gas is less flexible than oil. Storage and transport is harder and more expensive.
If the Germans had built more interconnecting pipelines with the neighbours and LNG ports as a backstop, then they would have been better off.
FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK:
That seems a really dodgy set of definitions to exclude heavy rail, buses, or ferries from your definition of public transport. Equally, it takes no account for the usability of the provision - merely its existence in some form...
Exactly: anyone who thinks the US has better public transport than the UK is a total idiot.
And anyone who thinks that public transport provision in the Netherlands is on par with the US, is also an idiot.
The Netherlands number is also wrong. There are exactly four cities in the Netherlands with populations over 250k:
- Amsterdam, which has a metro. - Rotterdam, which has a metro - The Hague, which has trams - Utrecht, which has light rail
The Norway number is just weird. There are only two urban centres with population over 250,000 -Oslo and Bergen so the only percentages they could quote are 0%,50% or 100%. How they get 65% is a mystery.
Apparently they have four, Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim. Tho that still doesn’t explain 65%.
Unless Stavanger and Tronjheim have both increased their populations by 25% in the last 3 years that is not correct.
The OECD defines “functional urban areas”. I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
I have looked and it really is rubbish in terms of what we are discussing.
According to the OECD a Functional Urban Area includes not only the city but all the adjacent non urban area which serves as commutor and feeder areas for the city. So According to their definition - and they are explicit in this - the Oxford FUA includes the Vale of the White Horse and West Oxfordshire and the Southhampton FUA includes the New Forest and the Test Valley.
Most of the areas listed as part of the Stavanger and Tronjheim FUAs are small villages and rural communities.
It is rubbish and has absolutely no bearing on what we have been discussing.
So you disagree that commuter areas should be included in an analysis of commuting systems?
“It’s a view”.
I disagree that any defintion of a city should include villages and towns miles from the urban area. I doubt anyone on here would seriously include the New Forest as part of the Southhampton Urban Area.
Face it, you used data without checking how it had been collected and what it was actually referencing. It may have some function in a different debate but in this instance complaining that a tram system does not extend to the New Forest of the Vale of the White Horse is pretty desperate stuff.
Well I disagree with you.
Southampton’s commuter area does extend to the New Forest, as you can see from the “travel to work area” maps published after every census.
You are perhaps caught up on the words “urban area”. And you are quarrelling now with the OECD and urban geographers.
The economic reason for public transport systems is indeed to improve access for a catchment of labour to jobs.
It’s entirely possible to imagine a tram from, say, Lyndhurst into Soton town centre.
Auckland, which has crap public transport, but with which I’m familiar, has a line terminating in the bush clad rurality of “Swanson” in the West, which is 10 miles from downtown.
No I am caught up on the fact that we were discussing cities with trams, metro and light rail systems and you have tried to introduce rural area miles from the urban sprawl because you won't admit that you used data without checking what it actually referred to.
No I correct that, you did admit that and when someone checked it for you and found out it was rubbish you then doubled down on it.
As someone has already said, your numbers were a classic example or garbage in garbage out.
And you have the cheek to criticise Andy's fact checking.
I haven’t introduced rural area miles, it’s the OECD!
Travel to work areas or functional urban areas or whatever you want to call them are pretty standard comparators, especially when one is talking about commuter systems.
Even the Tube goes out to deepest Amersham! But hey, you do you.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
I give no credit to Truss. Sunak shot himself in the foot in the debates by being patronising and slimey, particularly when addressing anything Truss said. I was (am) not a Truss fan but Sunak's manner turned me right off him.
The BBC and Guardian are leading on a stolen and improper kiss. I suppose Ukraine, Sudan, Niger, Putin, Wagner Group, Trump and various other things are pretty much sorted for now and it's a slow news day.
Agree. As one who often defends the BBC, and occasionally The Guardian, I have absolutely no idea why the story of the inappropriate Spanish snogger isn't confined to a minor piece on the sports pages.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
There was an idea for a while he was quite a good speaker, I remember people saying he sounded like Blair and had a good speaking voice. These people seem to have gone quietly.
For me I never bought it, he's maybe 1% more interesting than Starmer. Maybe. They're both dull as fuck.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
I give no credit to Truss. Sunak shot himself in the foot in the debates by being patronising and slimey, particularly when addressing anything Truss said. I was (am) not a Truss fan but Sunak's manner turned me right off him.
Bob Altermeyer would probably argue that Trump is the classic narcissistic authoritarian leader. In his model, the population that needs / wants to be led by a “strong leader” casts about for such an individual to project their desires on. In turn, the narcissist politician has no internal moral value structure of their own & depends utterly on the approval of the crowd. The two amplify each other, the crowd giving their chosen leader the attention they crave in return for the leader telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear.
You can see some of this playing out in the way Trump casts out ideas almost randomly at events, and latches on to the ones that resonate with the crowd (lock her up!) & abandons the ones that the crowd dislikes (e.g. covid vaccination).
Altermeyer comes across merely as a partisan of the other side in that piece. His list of things that supposedly harmed the United States depends on having a particular view of US foreign policy that isn't universally shared. How did Trump's "threats to NATO", i.e. telling Germany to spend more on defence and stop buying Russian gas, harm the US? If only they'd listened at the time...
How did Germany buying Russian gas end up hurting them?
It turns out - as I've repeated ad nauseum - that energy is pretty fungible. The Russian "we'll cut the Europeans off and they'll freeze" threat turned out to be complete rubbish.
Now: you can argue that the Russians did believe it, and based their decisions on that misconception. But that's hardly the German's fault.
Maybe it didn't hurt Germany, but that's a different question from the US national interest.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
I give no credit to Truss. Sunak shot himself in the foot in the debates by being patronising and slimey, particularly when addressing anything Truss said. I was (am) not a Truss fan but Sunak's manner turned me right off him.
Truss also gave a good showing at PMQs, usually answering the question, and usually debating the politics of the question. Sunak just does a poor Boris impression.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
I give no credit to Truss. Sunak shot himself in the foot in the debates by being patronising and slimey, particularly when addressing anything Truss said. I was (am) not a Truss fan but Sunak's manner turned me right off him.
Truss also gave a good showing at PMQs, usually answering the question, and usually debating the politics of the question. Sunak just does a poor Boris impression.
She was so scared of PMQs against KEIR STARMER she hid under a desk.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
I said he was shit right at the start of COVID.
I only realised it during the leadership campaign.
That doesn’t really explain the comparison with European peers, though, does it.
There’s maybe something in what you say, given Netherland’s results, but it’s a weak case as you make it.
We had loads of "real" railways long before other places got trams or light rail, and although I'm not an expert, unlike some on here, I suspect that we might have already built railway lines in many of the places we might have later built light rail.
Of course UK public transport looks particularly rubbish if you ignore our most used modes, and the one we spend the most money on. Likewise UK telecoms would look rubbish if you exclude our mobile networks and the absolutely massive fibre build-out that is taking place.
However.
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
Thank you for putting it much more gracefully than me.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
There are many things we can, should and must do to start a national recovery, and some of these may involve emulating successful policies from the Continent. But not all. How comfortable are you and Stuartinromford with items on the agenda that make use of no longer being in the EU, or might involve disagreement with the EU? Or do you insist that these don't exist?
I am quite happy to discuss them. You mistake me if you think I believe everything about the EU is amazing, or even if
Both of the people in this photo, President Donald Trump and NBA star Eric Gordon, are 6’3” and 215 pounds
Goes to show why BMI is such a stupid health measure
Quite. Muscle is a lot heavier than fat, as I keep telling my wife.
In cases like mine before I lost much of my weight it was a valid tool. But it is used by a lot of industrial/workplace medicals (not least my own) as a hard and fast measure which penalises the muscled. And offshore there are still a lot of that type - partly because of the nature of their work and partly because when thry are off shift there is bugger all to do other than go to the gym.
So I am still a stone or more overweight but have a reasonable BMI whilst other, far fitter and stronger people fail the BMI test.
I think SKS has something interesting about him that his detractors seem to have underestimated. He does have a genuinely working class background and can speak to it. There's something vaguely British aspirational about it, I agree he hasn't communicated it brilliantly.
I think most would conclude though that he has been an effective leader - and has grown into the role. I have a lot more confidence in him than I did Ed M.
Sunak's favourability graph must be one of the sharpest changes in history.
That’s because he’s shit. I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
I said he was shit right at the start of COVID.
I only realised it during the leadership campaign.
That's okay, at least you realised it. Some people were saying he was going to destroy SKS which I always thought was ludicrous. He has no policies or vision whatsoever, that much was obvious way back when. His only policy has been "throw money at it" and when the money ran out he was found severely wanting.
Some might have labelled that same charge at New Labour...
Bob Altermeyer would probably argue that Trump is the classic narcissistic authoritarian leader. In his model, the population that needs / wants to be led by a “strong leader” casts about for such an individual to project their desires on. In turn, the narcissist politician has no internal moral value structure of their own & depends utterly on the approval of the crowd. The two amplify each other, the crowd giving their chosen leader the attention they crave in return for the leader telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear.
You can see some of this playing out in the way Trump casts out ideas almost randomly at events, and latches on to the ones that resonate with the crowd (lock her up!) & abandons the ones that the crowd dislikes (e.g. covid vaccination).
Altermeyer comes across merely as a partisan of the other side in that piece. His list of things that supposedly harmed the United States depends on having a particular view of US foreign policy that isn't universally shared. How did Trump's "threats to NATO", i.e. telling Germany to spend more on defence and stop buying Russian gas, harm the US? If only they'd listened at the time...
How did Germany buying Russian gas end up hurting them?
It turns out - as I've repeated ad nauseum - that energy is pretty fungible. The Russian "we'll cut the Europeans off and they'll freeze" threat turned out to be complete rubbish.
Now: you can argue that the Russians did believe it, and based their decisions on that misconception. But that's hardly the German's fault.
Maybe it didn't hurt Germany, but that's a different question from the US national interest.
OK.
How would US national interest have been better served if Germany had bought gas from other countries?
Russia would have still produced the gas. They would still have sold the gas, only to different countries.
Sunak was impressive at the very very outset of Covid. He was simply more articulate than Boris. He sounded like the only adult in the room.
However, narcisstic campaign to dislodge Boris (complete with his own “logo” and Instagram photographer) pissed me off, as did his dubious tax arrangements.
Then I learned he was a kind of more-Thatcher than Thatcher fiscal loon, and his “performance” in the debates convinced me he was totally crap.
I think SKS has something interesting about him that his detractors seem to have underestimated. He does have a genuinely working class background and can speak to it. There's something vaguely British aspirational about it, I agree he hasn't communicated it brilliantly.
I think most would conclude though that he has been an effective leader - and has grown into the role. I have a lot more confidence in him than I did Ed M.
Major had a genuinely working class background and he was a pretty crap PM. I am more interested in what Starmer says and does than in his personal background.
I think SKS has something interesting about him that his detractors seem to have underestimated. He does have a genuinely working class background and can speak to it. There's something vaguely British aspirational about it, I agree he hasn't communicated it brilliantly.
I think most would conclude though that he has been an effective leader - and has grown into the role. I have a lot more confidence in him than I did Ed M.
Major had a genuinely working class background and he was a pretty crap PM. I am more interested in what Starmer says and does than in his personal background.
I think Major has been a lot better than basically every Tory PM that has come since.
I think SKS has something interesting about him that his detractors seem to have underestimated. He does have a genuinely working class background and can speak to it. There's something vaguely British aspirational about it, I agree he hasn't communicated it brilliantly.
I think most would conclude though that he has been an effective leader - and has grown into the role. I have a lot more confidence in him than I did Ed M.
I saw a clip of him trying to talk to ordinary voters this week and he seemed very stilted and stuck in Westminster jargon mode, pronouncing 'cost of living crisis' as if it were a single word.
I think SKS has something interesting about him that his detractors seem to have underestimated. He does have a genuinely working class background and can speak to it. There's something vaguely British aspirational about it, I agree he hasn't communicated it brilliantly.
I think most would conclude though that he has been an effective leader - and has grown into the role. I have a lot more confidence in him than I did Ed M.
Major had a genuinely working class background and he was a pretty crap PM. I am more interested in what Starmer says and does than in his personal background.
I think Major has been a lot better than basically every Tory PM that has come since.
Cameron was better than Major. But to be honest that is not saying much about any of them.
I had to disappear while the Hanratty wars were still raging on the previous thread. Funny how such an old case still stirs passions. I don't want to revisit the many issues raised about the case itself - it would take too long and require huge knowledge of the facts - but I did want to cover a couple of points concerning the more managable topic of the DNA revelations, as these were relatively recent and clearly subject to some misapprehensions here.
Before the DNA results became known I was of the opinion that the true identity of the murderer could not be known with any certainty. I estimated the probaility that it was Hanratty at about 20%. When I heard the results, like many others my first reaction was 'Well that's a surprise. How wrong I was.' On closer consideration however I soon realised that it wasn't quite as simple as that. As I tried to explain earlier (largely unsuccessfully it seems) there were problems with the samples, materials could not have been appropriately stored, possible cross-contamination would have been an issue, not to mention just plain old-fashioned rigging.
It would however be as perverse to dismiss the DNA contribution out of hand as it would to accept it uncritically. Personally I upgraded my own estimate of Hanratty's guilt to 25% as a result. Alphon I would now have at 50%, and the remaining 25% allows for person(s) unknown who were never seriously investigated at the time.
I take the view however that not only does the DNA evidence seems to finally close all avenues of appeal but that that is a good thing. Hanratty may not have been the murderer but he was an odious little criminal who contributed greatly to his own demise, not least by lying to the court and his own defence counsel until he belatedly realised that he may well swing for the crime. If the DNA results had exonerated him, the case would have had to be reopened and we would have had the ghastly prospect of the whole business being trawled over again, and this time with every likelihood of civil actions against the police for their mishandling of the original inquiry. It may shock you to learn that I don't think that would be a very good use of public money and resources. It may shock you even more to know that if I had been running the DNA tests, I might have been seriously tempted to find a result that avoided that outcome.
Although the A6 Murder still divides opinion there is a surprising amount of agreement on certain aspects of it. For example, most agree that on the facts presented at the trial, he should have been found not guilty. It should never have been held in Bedford. And of course the police made a right pig's ear of the investigation.
My own view on the main question is a common one, DNA results notwithstanding. It's impossible to be sure who did it but on the balance of probabilities Alphon was always a more likely suspect, and remains so to this day.
Thanks for this summary. I think you have a couple of obstacles to overcome.
As to the original trial, the identification evidence (as the law was then) took the matter past half time - the judge would have ruled there was a case to answer.
Once you are at that point the defence can either put up or shut up. A defence was put up, and the defence changed during from the trial from one alibi to another. Two differing and weak alibis covering the same time period do not amount to a credible defence. The jury were entitled to draw their own conclusions that such a defence could only be mounted by someone who was guilty.
Secondly, the new DNA evidence (clothing and handkerchief) is of itself compelling. Those who say 'cross contamination/plant' have to mount a basis with possible facts and a timeline upon which this is possible and credible. Generalisations won't do.
Ask this question: If the new DNA examination had shown up DNA other than Hanratty, would Michael Mansfield QC (as he then was) have suggested contamination as plausible?
All I'm trying to do here, Al, is illustrate why the DNA evidence should be approached with some caution.
I am sure there are some who think it nails Hanratty, and others who think it should be disregarded. I think both extremes are wrong and that is best seen as implicating him more than was previously the case. Since I take the view that the case against him was poor to begin with I'm saying a 25% probability now as against 20% before. OK?
As for identification, the prosecution case was based almost entirely on it. I think we all know what a tricky business identification is even in straightforward cases. In the A6 murder case, the killer was masked thoughout, the ordeal began and ended during the hours of darkeness, and in the first line up she did, Valerie Storey positively and emphatically identified a man who could not possibly have been the suspect. You see the problem?
I find it hard to escape the conclusion that Hanratty's fate was determined as much by public outrage and a hue and cry that demanded a victim as it was by his own stupidity and arrogance.
On Sunak, I decided he was rubbish even earlier, during the 2019 GE, when he deputised for Boris in one of the leader debates. He was stilted, wooden and dull. Nothing since has changed my view for the better. Rather, I think, as LG says, he's added a rather poor Boris impression and a healthy dose of being patronising to his repertoire, not to mention the child-like PR videos. He's not really a serious politician.
Comments
Ahead. Groove factor 10
Heck, look at the words you yourself used. "FPT, even the US does better in public transport infrastructure than the UK"
Yes, if you exclude the most commonly used form of public transport, then the data is simply wrong.
Or to quote you again: "This is such bollocks."
Have we had the ‘he sells sanctuary’ gag yet.
You can complain about the exclusion of buses, but I haven’t seen you correct the data.
My gentle advice is not to go into the fact-checking business yourself.
Is the H91 (https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/route/h91/) a really, really fuck off gigantic limo?
I don't think it's FBPE Frothing to say that the UK economy isn't in great shape, and hadn't been for a while- going back well before 2016. And we all want to make things better... don't we?
So one way forward is to look for ways that the UK does things differently to Abroad and see if there are any lessons from that.
One possibility is that our public transport mix in second tier cities is less useful. Maybe buses and heavy rail are less useful than trams and metros. (Perhaps buses are too slow and unreliable, perhaps heavy rail doesn't go to the right places. I don't know.)
But if we bristle at any unfavorable comparison and seek to poke holes in it, we're not going to get anywhere as a country.
(I've mentioned before that my big fear is that people and countries often need to hit rock bottom before they rethink. The UK is a long long way from that, but it would be nice to improve things before we got there.)
https://www.tomforth.co.uk/birminghamisasmallcity/
There's a big difference between having a tram line and having a network.
So yes, the data is wrong.
I challenge you to find a single UK FUA without buses or any other public transport infrastructure. Let alone 75% of them.
My fear is that many on here are quite representative in that they’d prefer to “bristle” as you put it, rather than confront reality and find practical possible solutions.
I often note that Britain is now quite a bit behind the productivity or wealth frontier so in theory there ought to be several things we can do to escalate growth rates. There’s a lot of catch up to do and I see no good reason why Britain can’t aspire to be as well off as it’s neighbours and peer countries.
So you’re arguing against a straw man.
Comme d’habitude.
I haven’t looked at their methodology, but i presume it goes beyond political boundaries which often provide false comparisons.
Having one bus that leaves once an hour and only heads into the town centre is a crap form of public transport.
Having routine buses that leave every few minutes and where you can easily get from anywhere to anywhere is excellent.
Having few tram lines that goes not very many places, not very often is a crap form of public transport.
Having many tram lines with trams that go everywhere every few minutes is excellent.
The quality is not determined by whether bus or tram, its the quality. The reliability, the frequency, the ability to easily get around.
Something that can't really be discussed in such a silly boolean format.
Any chart that says that the US has better public transport than the UK is patently ridiculous.
On this thread, anyway.
As it happens, I do think excluding buses is still a useful lens, for the reason noted in the link cited by @Stuartinromford.
I’m persuadable on heavy rail.
Anyone who takes that chart credibly is only showing their own ignorance and how credulous they are.
Its bullshit data, based on bullshit criteria. Bullshit in, bullshit out.
Its past time for you to admit that you got this wrong, got suckered in by trolling nonsense, drop it and move on.
The chart, admittedly if you read the small print, makes a definition of public transport in which the US appears to outpace the UK.
I agree it is counterintuitive which is why I shared it.
It makes you think.
I associate the whole Germans=Nazis thing with (1) A small number of survivors of those times, (2) modern morons.
The Germans have spent a great deal of time, effort and soul searching in creating a Germany that Isn't *That* Kind Of Germany.
The national anthem predates the Nazis. Oh, and it has been modified - to remove the imperialist bits.
*Even the USSR didn't freak out about it.
In which case, pointing out that UK mid sized cities make much less use of light rail/trams/metros than foreign mid sized cities is exactly the point.
Albeit the headline is poor.
I had to disappear while the Hanratty wars were still raging on the previous thread. Funny how such an old case still stirs passions. I don't want to revisit the many issues raised about the case itself - it would take too long and require huge knowledge of the facts - but I did want to cover a couple of points concerning the more managable topic of the DNA revelations, as these were relatively recent and clearly subject to some misapprehensions here.
Before the DNA results became known I was of the opinion that the true identity of the murderer could not be known with any certainty. I estimated the probaility that it was Hanratty at about 20%. When I heard the results, like many others my first reaction was 'Well that's a surprise. How wrong I was.' On closer consideration however I soon realised that it wasn't quite as simple as that. As I tried to explain earlier (largely unsuccessfully it seems) there were problems with the samples, materials could not have been appropriately stored, possible cross-contamination would have been an issue, not to mention just plain old-fashioned rigging.
It would however be as perverse to dismiss the DNA contribution out of hand as it would to accept it uncritically. Personally I upgraded my own estimate of Hanratty's guilt to 25% as a result. Alphon I would now have at 50%, and the remaining 25% allows for person(s) unknown who were never seriously investigated at the time.
I take the view however that not only does the DNA evidence seems to finally close all avenues of appeal but that that is a good thing. Hanratty may not have been the murderer but he was an odious little criminal who contributed greatly to his own demise, not least by lying to the court and his own defence counsel until he belatedly realised that he may well swing for the crime. If the DNA results had exonerated him, the case would have had to be reopened and we would have had the ghastly prospect of the whole business being trawled over again, and this time with every likelihood of civil actions against the police for their mishandling of the original inquiry. It may shock you to learn that I don't think that would be a very good use of public money and resources. It may shock you even more to know that if I had been running the DNA tests, I might have been seriously tempted to find a result that avoided that outcome.
Although the A6 Murder still divides opinion there is a surprising amount of agreement on certain aspects of it. For example, most agree that on the facts presented at the trial, he should have been found not guilty. It should never have been held in Bedford. And of course the police made a right pig's ear of the investigation.
My own view on the main question is a common one, DNA results notwithstanding. It's impossible to be sure who did it but on the balance of probabilities Alphon was always a more likely suspect, and remains so to this day.
Perhaps it tells us something about Britain’s urban economic performance.
Where I live the problem with buses isn't congestion, its far more the lack of frequency.
If I presented a chart that showed race relations in 1960's US as better than 1960s Switzerland, would that "Make you think"? It would certainly make me wonder how the data had been tortured*...
If you wanted to present a chart on take-up of light rail, that would be interesting.
*Presumably shot and dumped in a levy.
According to the OECD a Functional Urban Area includes not only the city but all the adjacent non urban area which serves as commutor and feeder areas for the city. So According to their definition - and they are explicit in this - the Oxford FUA includes the Vale of the White Horse and West Oxfordshire and the Southhampton FUA includes the New Forest and the Test Valley.
Most of the areas listed as part of the Stavanger and Tronjheim FUAs are small villages and rural communities.
It is rubbish and has absolutely no bearing on what we have been discussing.
But I guess you’re trying to make another point.
The chart is a kind of proxy for light rail, isn’t it?
I mean, it’s included, whereas heavy rail is not.
“It’s a view”.
If the data doesn't pass the "sniff test" then you should question it and double-check the data and methodology. If the methodology is sound (this one is not) and the data is right, that should make you stop and think. If the data is wrong or the methodology is, then put the thing in the bin or fix it.
Face it, you used data without checking how it had been collected and what it was actually referencing. It may have some function in a different debate but in this instance complaining that a tram system does not extend to the New Forest of the Vale of the White Horse is pretty desperate stuff.
The Stavanger ‘metro area’, for example, has a population over 300k.
It’s a pretty pointless argument, though.
A bit of reading suggests Norwegian public transport is considerably better than ours (certainly outside London) - but they are, of course, a far wealthier country.
This crap sells papers.
Expect more confected graphs in the FT showing the UK is shit/bottom of everything, and be suspicious accordingly.
As to the original trial, the identification evidence (as the law was then) took the matter past half time - the judge would have ruled there was a case to answer.
Once you are at that point the defence can either put up or shut up. A defence was put up, and the defence changed during from the trial from one alibi to another. Two differing and weak alibis covering the same time period do not amount to a credible defence. The jury were entitled to draw their own conclusions that such a defence could only be mounted by someone who was guilty.
Secondly, the new DNA evidence (clothing and handkerchief) is of itself compelling. Those who say 'cross contamination/plant' have to mount a basis with possible facts and a timeline upon which this is possible and credible. Generalisations won't do.
Ask this question: If the new DNA examination had shown up DNA other than Hanratty, would Michael Mansfield QC (as he then was) have suggested contamination as plausible?
Southampton’s commuter area does extend to the New Forest, as you can see from the “travel to work area” maps published after every census.
You are perhaps caught up on the words “urban area”.
And you are quarrelling now with the OECD and urban geographers.
The economic reason for public transport systems is indeed to improve access for a catchment of labour to jobs.
It’s entirely possible to imagine a tram from, say, Lyndhurst into Soton town centre.
Auckland, which has crap public transport, but with which I’m familiar, has a line terminating in the bush clad rurality of “Swanson” in the West, which is 10 miles from downtown.
GBNews is not a reliable news source.
Labour would deliver a proper windfall tax on oil and gas giants to cut the cost of living now.
Our mission to run Britain on 100% clean power by 2030 will cut bills, create good jobs and ensure our energy security.
12:52 PM · Aug 25, 2023
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1695041425333768578
How long until Slalom Sir Keir has to swerve away from this horseshit?
So you'd need some pretty good data to start making people believe that it was better in the US.
Old stats course gag - Between 1860 and 1960 no White man was convicted of murdering a Black man in Mississippi. Lots of Black men were convicted of murdering White men. What can we conclude about race relations in Mississippi?
You mistake me if you think I believe everything about the EU is amazing, or even if there are not some potential advantages (comparable though, rather than absolute) from leaving the EU.
You mistake me if you think I believe everything about the EU is amazing, or even if Not at all.
You’ve simply dismissed it, as you do with any data you dislike (pretty much most data these days, it must be exhausting).
Barty has done his usual thing of setting up a straw man.
Tyndall has got himself entangled in a debate with urban geographers and the OECD.
Just trying to present some alternative facts to make people think.
New from
@IpsosUK
: 56% of the public think it is likely that Keir Starmer will be PM. Back up to previous highs last October - that poll was taken at the time Liz Truss resigned.
Quick 🧵
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1695005597131821511
1/ Starmer is ahead of Sunak on most leadership traits
Especially understanding the problems facing Britain and being in touch with ordinary people.
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1695005599199625626
2/ Perceptions of Sunak have weakened since he became PM. Note the difference in today's figures vs last November on:
- Understanding problems facing Britain (-14pts)
- Pays attention to detail (-10)
- Trust him to get big decisions right (-10)
- Capable leader (-8)
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1695005601149964296
3/ It's not all good news for Starmer. Public are still split on knowing what he stands for. Will this become more important as election approaches? You'd think so and yet...
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1695005603091849243
4/ ...the big picture is about the Tory and Labour brands.
In terms of public favourability, Labour is net positive whereas Conservatives are at -30 with 53% unfavourable.
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1695005604878696726
5/ We can talk about public not being 100% sold on Labour or there being doubts about Starmer etc (some truth in it, some overblown) but whilst the Tories are in this territory it probably doesn't matter.
You don't have to be a data nerd like me to know that's a bad trend!
https://twitter.com/keiranpedley/status/1695005607458120177
It turns out - as I've repeated ad nauseum - that energy is pretty fungible. The Russian "we'll cut the Europeans off and they'll freeze" threat turned out to be complete rubbish.
Now: you can argue that the Russians did believe it, and based their decisions on that misconception. But that's hardly the German's fault.
It’s dishonest, let’s face it.
I always said he was shit, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, I admit that I thought Truss outclassed him in the debates.
Is there any area in which he has comparative favourability over Starmer?
No I correct that, you did admit that and when someone checked it for you and found out it was rubbish you then doubled down on it.
As someone has already said, your numbers were a classic example or garbage in garbage out.
And you have the cheek to criticise Andy's fact checking.
And we've just demonstrated why this isn't a reliable news source.
What you've failed to detect is that polarisation automatically works both ways as both sides pander to their base to keep market share.
But, you're not big enough.
It took a fair bit of time to get the alternatives on line, and prices are still higher than they were. There was a massive campaign to reduce gas usage throughout Germany, which still continues.
Gas is less flexible than oil. Storage and transport is harder and more expensive.
If the Germans had built more interconnecting pipelines with the neighbours and LNG ports as a backstop, then they would have been better off.
Travel to work areas or functional urban areas or whatever you want to call them are pretty standard comparators, especially when one is talking about commuter systems.
Even the Tube goes out to deepest Amersham!
But hey, you do you.
For me I never bought it, he's maybe 1% more interesting than Starmer. Maybe. They're both dull as fuck.
Unless he plans on redefining the words, there's no way we can get close to even 50% clean energy, if we include farming, transport and heating
It's a ludicrously unrealistic aspiration
"Jenni Hermoso 'didn't consent' to Luis Rubiales kiss as Spain players refuse to play"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/66621772
So I am still a stone or more overweight but have a reasonable BMI whilst other, far fitter and stronger people fail the BMI test.
I think most would conclude though that he has been an effective leader - and has grown into the role. I have a lot more confidence in him than I did Ed M.
Some might have labelled that same charge at New Labour...
How would US national interest have been better served if Germany had bought gas from other countries?
Russia would have still produced the gas. They would still have sold the gas, only to different countries.
He was simply more articulate than Boris. He sounded like the only adult in the room.
However, narcisstic campaign to dislodge Boris (complete with his own “logo” and Instagram photographer) pissed me off, as did his dubious tax arrangements.
Then I learned he was a kind of more-Thatcher than Thatcher fiscal loon, and his “performance” in the debates convinced me he was totally crap.
And I found the dragon!
I am sure there are some who think it nails Hanratty, and others who think it should be disregarded. I think both extremes are wrong and that is best seen as implicating him more than was previously the case. Since I take the view that the case against him was poor to begin with I'm saying a 25% probability now as against 20% before. OK?
As for identification, the prosecution case was based almost entirely on it. I think we all know what a tricky business identification is even in straightforward cases. In the A6 murder case, the killer was masked thoughout, the ordeal began and ended during the hours of darkeness, and in the first line up she did, Valerie Storey positively and emphatically identified a man who could not possibly have been the suspect. You see the problem?
I find it hard to escape the conclusion that Hanratty's fate was determined as much by public outrage and a hue and cry that demanded a victim as it was by his own stupidity and arrogance.
and beer in the old town square.
He's not really a serious politician.